126 DON'T FACE 1994 WITHOUT 11 ø . '" KO ..... 1t> I I "i", .. .. It Roomy appointment pages. Cheery illustra- tions. A ribbon marker. Plus a wealth of useful information: About Town listing jòr New York, as well as hotels and restaurants in 18 other cities. Also handy 800# listings. Six major-city maps, all zn color. Very New Yorker. Yours by callzng: 800-336-5510 jòr credit card orders, or send check or money order jòr $14.95 plus $2 shipping and handling to: THE NEW YORKER 1994 POCKET DIARY Dept. 020925, Box 10214, Des Moines, LA 50336 * Please add sales fax for CA, CO, GA, IA, IL, KY. lvfA. MI. Nj. NY. OH; Canada, 7% C.S. T. Allow 4-6 weeks for deltvery. @ The New Yorker Magazine Inc ON TELEVISION AMATEUR HOURS BY JAMES WOLCOTT The cast of "Saturday Night Live": shaped less by standup than by megadoses of MTV. C OULD performing become a thing of the past? When you watch the last vestiges of variety program- ming on TV today, it's as if singing, dancing, and comedy were in danger of becoming quaint artisan crafts, like glass- blowing. Once, performers trained and practiced to transcend their everyday per- sonalities, to become big-screen projec- tions of their minds' desires. Now many of them insist on be- ing true to their own sloppy selves. They settle for graphic interface with the audience, taking to heart Woody Allen's wisecrack that eighty per cent of life con- sists of showing up. "The Paula Pound- stone Show," a com- edy experiment in pain conducted on a live audience in Los Angeles, was a showcase for this vague new form of no-entertainment. Although the co- median dressed for her show like Cir- cus Girl (striped pants, red vest, pol- ka -dot bow tie), she presided over it as if it were a high- school assembly, addressing the audience as "you guys." 'We got a pretty interest- ing show for you guys," she lied. Her première featured a recycling expert in a booth who fielded questions about land- fill. On another segment, she handed out piles of "Paula" dollars to the audience, which were collected and deposited in transparent drums to show how our tax money is distributed. If the editor of Tik- kun ever ran a summer camp, this is what it would be like-civics for simpletons. I watched Paula Poundstone with ap- palled fascination, dumbfounded that such earnest dither occupied an hour of prime-time network television. The people at ABC must have been equally agape, <.. -. \. .... because they dropped the cloth on her cage after only two episodes, even though they had committed themselves to thir- teen. (It was the second-swiftest execu- tion of the season, CBS having cancelled "South of Sunset" after just one show.) The embarrassing rub out of "The Paula Poundstone Show" has been compared with Chevy Chase's quick flop. Both were comics who through ego or bad advice let themselves get caught unprepared. But there's one difference. Chevy Chase's eyes knew fear. They flinched, as if pleading, "Please make it stop, please make it stop." Poundstone, on the other hand, was unfazed. She galumphed around onstage, nattering about nothing, her face a blank slate. She was like a pod person, Prozac in a flesh-colored shell. She seemed to screen out any sig- nals that didn't conform to her al- pha state. The failure of "The Paula Poundstone Show" could be written off as a singular folly. The en- semble series "Saturday Night Live" has no such fallback. Now in its nineteenth year on NBC, "S.N .L." is a group effort boasting the largest regular lineup on TV. The opening credits seem to take forever, as the cast's hopeful young faces flip past like a pack of Actors' Equity playing cards. Yet, except for the veteran Phil Hartman, whose sentry eyes and denture-grip grin turn his square, plaster- of- Paris head into a Mad-magazine car- toon, the cast seems oddly starless. There's a distinct charisma deficiency. Even Mike -' Myers seems muted, perhaps atoning for getting uppity after 'Wayne's World." It's as if the show's producer, Lorne C3 \. ....... .,..,. r:J?< .". ) '....